MAN AND THE LAVA BEDS. 701 



as Professor Whitney relates it, but with some additional details 

 bearing specially upon the points here raised though they had 

 not been raised at that time. He said to me that when he 

 gave the skull to Dr. Jones, soon after Mr. Mattison had given 

 it to him, he was not able to furnish the particulars to the 

 Doctor, as at the time he was not impressed with its impor- 

 tance. Dr. Jones, therefore, put it outside his office, with 

 other collections of a similar sort, where it lay for several 

 months until Mr. Mattison came to him one day for medical 

 treatment, whereupon he asked him the particulars about the 

 discovery of the skull, which he then for the first time learned. 

 This, therefore, makes it possible that while Mr. Mattison 

 found a skull as he asserts he did and gave it to Mr. Scribner 

 the wrong one was selected from Dr. Jones' pile, so that nothing 

 is known now of the nature of the true skull or of the incrusta- 

 tion upon it. But that Mr. Scribner or Dr. Jones endeavored 

 to impose upon Professor Whitney, is not credible from the 

 known character of the men, and from their behavior in the 

 whole matter; while there would have been no motive for 

 any one to have imposed upon poor Mr. Mattison who was 

 spending his last cent in vain efforts to find gold. And cer- 

 tainly, he made no effort to profit from the alleged discovery. 

 It follows simply that we must drop out of the discussion 

 everything that has been heretofore been said about the 

 character of the skull. With that absent the discovery 

 reported by Mr. Mattison becomes more easily credible than 

 it was before. 



A discovery in Idaho strongly confirmatory of tnose on the 

 Pacific Coast is too important and interesting to be omitted. 



In the autumn of 1889, Mr. Charles Francis Adams, then 

 President of the Union Pacific Railroad, brought to my notice 

 a small clay image, an inch and a half in length, which had 

 been found by Mr. M. A. Kurtz while boring an artesian well 

 at Nampa, Ada county, Idaho. The image was of slightly 

 baked clay, incrusted in part with a coating of red oxide of 



